Monday, November 12, 2012

Eli was in Barnes and Noble, just hangin' waiting for Ms. Rabett to complete her Suduko collection (she does Suduko in 20 languages, clever bunny) when the Rabett came across the Stanford Social Innovation Review the cover of which, well, it's over there on the right, featuring an article by Andrew J. Hoffman. Hoffman is a much more important guy than Eli, a big name in sustainable development but Eli will explain later how reading this article brought clarity to many things that are frequently discussed on Rabett Run, and how there is a fundamental disagreement with Hoffman and his framing of the what to do issue and how Hoffman's framing is self defeating The article starts with

In May 2009, a development officer at the University of Michigan asked me to meet with a potential
donor—a former football player and now successful businessman who had an interest in environmental
issues and business, my interdisciplinary area of expertise. The meeting began at 7 a.m., and
while I was still nursing my first cup of coffee, the potential donor began the conversation with “I think
the scientific review process is corrupt.” I asked what he thought of a university based on that system,
and he said that he thought that the university was then corrupt, too. He went on to describe the science
of climate change as a hoax, using all the familiar lines of attack—sunspots and solar flares, the
unscientific and politically flawed consensus model, and the environmental benefits of carbon dioxide.

As we debated each point, he turned his attack on me, asking why
I hated capitalism and why I wanted to destroy the economy by teaching
environmental issues in a business school. Eventually, he asked if
I knew why Earth Day was on April 22. I sighed as he explained, “Because
it is Karl Marx’s birthday.” (I suspect he meant to say Vladimir
Lenin, whose birthday is April 22, also Earth Day. This linkage has
been made by some on the far right who believe that Earth Day is a
communist plot, even though Lenin never promoted environmentalism
and communism does not have a strong environmental legacy.)

At this point Hoffman had backed the "potential donor" into the ten impossible and contradictory things position characteristic of human climate change denial, but rather than directly confronting the fellow he

. .turned to the development officer and asked, “What’s our agenda
here this morning?” The donor interrupted to say that he wanted to
buy me a ticket to the Heartland Institute’s Fourth Annual Conference
on Climate Change, the leading climate skeptics conference.
I checked my calendar and, citing prior commitments, politely declined.
The meeting soon ended.

As the Rabett discussed yesterday, what the "potential donor" people are looking for is affirmation and engaging with them on their terms is a fools errand. Rejection is what they need and deserve, maybe polite rejection, but rejection none the less and it is what is needed for the public discussion. Giving affirmation and understanding only prolongs the denial..

Yet, as bunnies know, fools are everywhere, and rejection is a strenuous task. Walking away is much easier and it is hard for academics to simply reject idiocy without looking inward to find some excuse for the idiot, especially, Eli guesses, for rich idiots who might donate to the University.

You then get the feel sorry for the Republicans and Mitt Romney trope from Hoffman,

The more I thought about it,
the more I began to see that he was speaking from a coherent and
consistent worldview—one I did not agree with, but which was a coherent
viewpoint nonetheless. Plus, he had come to evangelize me.
The more I thought about it, the more I became eager to learn about
where he was coming from, where I was coming from, and why our
two worldviews clashed so strongly in the present social debate over
climate science. Ironically, in his desire to challenge my research,
he stimulated a new research stream, one that fit perfectly with my
broader research agenda on social, institutional, and cultural change.

Which is kind of worrying because there is such a literature, even Eli knows about it, and this guy thinks he has something new? OTOH, Eli has to wonder even more about Hoffman who says that

Although the US
Supreme Court decided in 2007 that greenhouse gases were legally
an air pollutant, in a cultural sense, they are something far different.
The reduction of greenhouse gases is not the same as the reduction
of sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, or particulates.

which is just wrong. There ARE major natural sources of sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide and certainly particulates. Still this is just a chemists niggle. By his ignorance Hoffman destroys one of the strengths of his argument, perhaps in an attempt to bring over those in denial or sitting on the fence, or just not paying attention. The article then degenerates into the usual framing nonsense, but what caught Eli's eye was the analogy with tobacco

The first obstacle is the powerful lobby of industrial forces that
can resist a social and political consensus. In the case of the cigarette
debate, powerful economic interests mounted a campaign to obfuscate
the scientific evidence and to block a social and political consensus.
Tobacco companies created their own pro-tobacco science, but eventually
the public health community overcame pro-tobacco scientists.

This was not at all what happened. What happened was that several states and a bunch of plaintiff's lawyers hauled the tobacco companies into court and cleaned their clock and wallets.

The second obstacle to convincing a skeptical public is the lack
of a definitive statement by the scientific community about the future
implications of climate change. The 2007 IPCC report states
that “Human activities … are modifying the concentration of atmospheric
constituents … that absorb or scatter radiant energy. …
[M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is very likely
to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas emissions.” Some
point to the word “likely” to argue that scientists still don’t know
and action in unwarranted. But science is not designed to provide a
definitive smoking gun.

Hoffman proceeds into never never Sandy land, e.g. you can't prove that every case of lung cancer is caused by tobacco smoke, therefore there is no proof.

Remember that the 1964 surgeon general’s
report about the dangers of smoking was equally conditional. And
even today, we cannot state with scientific certainty that smoking
causes lung cancer. Like the global climate, the human body is too
complex a system for absolute certainty. We can explain epidemiologically
why a person could get cancer from cigarette smoking and
statistically how that person will likely get cancer, but, as the surgeon
general report explains, “statistical methods cannot establish proof
of a causal relationship in an association [between cigarette smoking
and lung cancer]. The causal significance of an association is a
matter of judgment, which goes beyond any statement of statistical
probability.” Yet the general public now accepts this causal linkage.

BECAUSE THE TOBACCO COMPANIES WERE FORCED TO ADMIT THIS IN COURT AS THE PRICE FOR BEING ALLOWED TO STAY IN BUSINESS and even then, aided by Fred Singer, they held off smoking bans in restaurants and offices for a decade with the same obfustication tactics.

Let us close with Occupy Sandy, a working relief effort in NYC and now New Jersey which is directly bringing help to those most affected by the storm. By throwing a large volunteer effort at the problem they have surmounted the hurdles limiting the Red Cross to asking only for monetary donations. They have set up an Amazon wedding registry web page which allows people to donate just about anything that is needed. Those who derided Occupy Wall Street (out of which Occupy Sandy grew) asking what is next, owe some apologies.

65 comments:

Could Eli please prevail on Ms Rabbett to review Sudoku X Book 1,? I have long wondered if the author, ( full disclosure, he is also my shirtmaker) is any better at puzzle editing than climate modeling.

Eli can then return to explaining where his commitment to the second hand precautionary principle puts him in the campaign for candle, cajun pan-blackened redfish, frankincense, myrrh, diesel engine, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, crepes suzette and barbecue prohibition ?

coherent (logically related; of an argument, discourse, reasoning, etc.: consistent, non-contradictory, logical, in the relation of its parts)viewpoint (a mental standpoint from which a matter is considered)

Why quote the Surgeon General when there's the Tobacco Archive? The tobacco companies knew far more about health effects than the Surgeon General did, decades earlier. This "causal linkage" language reminds me of the "virtual risks" idea that attempts to devalue statistical and epidemiological work.

He's fallen for the argument that if you don't see bodies stacked on _your_ block then the risk isn't really a risk to _you_, only to somebody else.

-------------"... How would you feel if the world was falling apart around you

Pieces of the sky were falling in your neighbors yardBut not on youWouldn't you feel just a little bit funnyThink maybe there's something you oughta do ...."-----------"Before Believing" (Danny Flowers)

As to origin...? I can recall (from more years than I can care to remember now), in my youth, standing on railway platforms watching the trains coming and going and platform staff from time to time wiping the platform clocks with a wet chamois leather... So perhaps the metaphor was born of the Victorian/Edwardian era.

Good call, Eli. This guy, "The Hoff", I am surprised he didn't go all "post-normal science" on us. Here in the Antipodes we have a so-called Prime Minister's science adviser who peppers his speeches with "good science should be values-free" and declares that climate science is "value-laden", and it is also "complex", and therefore it is "post normal". ARghhhh!

It's not just those who "derided" Occupy Wall Street who owe "apologies".

It's the political leaders (including the Constitutional law professor at the top) who basically remained silent (or worse) while "ordinary" Americans (who are, in reality, quite extra-ordinary) were deprived of their first amendment rights to assemble and speak -- and in some cases brutalized with police batons and pepper spray -- thereby implicitly (if not explicitly) supporting the harsh (sometimes brutal) push-back against the Occupy movement.

Can't have "ordinary" Americans "deriding" the behavior of corporate America during a multi-billion dollar corporate-funded election campaign, now can we?

Of course, the probability that the "Silentcers" will ever "apologize" is basically zero.

Eli mentioned that the tobacco industry was sued by smokers, and by states who had pay the healthcare costs of smokers. Individual plaintiffs had a difficult time in court, because the companies stonewalled them, and the tobacco companies had deeper pockets than the plaintiffs or their lawyers. State governments had more ability to persevere compared with individual plaintiffs. The ultimate bill for the tobacco companies was $250 billion.

The Sandy disaster has created a lot of people whose houses and finances are wrecked. Maybe they could line up some lawyers and sue the deniers and/or the oil companies. Maybe they could get some state governments on board also.

"Sustainable Development" as conceived by the Brundtland Commission in the mid 1980s was a UN plan for civilization to cope with the clearly evident problems caused by too much human impact on the biosphere. Because the basis of the plan involved increasing the size of civilization by a factor of ten, many found it not credible. As more credible plans involved believing the developed world would accept that it had to live at a lower living standard, the more credible plans were taken to be even less credible.

"Sustainable development" as a plan, is as good as if a doctor who just diagnosed you as having lung cancer told you to up your cigarette consumption from one pack a day to ten.

It is no wonder that a "big name in sustainable development" writes something self-defeating that Eli fundamentally disagrees with.

A bit o background for doubting bunnies who otherwise might want to believe sustainable development is possible and reasonable: at the time "sustainable development" was conceived there were about one billion people living at developed world standards. It was obvious the the human population must stabilize if any solution was to be found for the many problems caused by too much human impact on the biosphere. A way to stabilize human population was thought to be to raise living standards to those prevalent in the then developed world, as it had been observed that in general, developed world populations were stable or decreasing. Demographers supplied estimates that there was no way to avoid 10 billion people by 2050, but economists noted that given the fastest conceivable rates of economic growth, if most of the growth was channeled into the developing world somehow, ta da, those 10 billion people would be living at the standard 1 billion in the 1980s developed world, and hence, at last, global population could be stable in 2050. If all these people conducted themselves properly, somehow, everything would be fine.

The planetary life support systems were blowing out as 1 billion people used 80% of the Earth's resources back in the 1980s, but, ten times as many people were going to find a way, and that way was to be called "sustainable development".

Climate change and ozone depletion, i.e. planetary problems caused by the wastes of civilization hadn't started to seep into the collective consciousness as problems when all this was conceived, but were hitting the news at the time "sustainable development" was unveiled when "Our Common Future", the book promoting it, was published.

The concept briefly hit big time debate, but it lacked a certain credibility, as I have explained, which is why the word "sustainability" quickly entered the lexicon, as something everyone could be in favor of, because no one knew what it was. You could promote something as part of sustainable development, and critics would say but that plan means certain destruction for the biosphere and probably civilization. If you said what you were doing promoted "sustainability", no one could nail you with anything.

A few diehards kept up the "sustainable development" line, such as Andrew J. Hoffman.

William Safire wrote "Clean Your Clock" for the NY Times in 2006 under a heading "On Language".

J. Robert Oppenheimer, atomic and nuclear physicist, director of the Manhattan Project, was born on April 22.

Earth Day was conceived by pro nuclear types who wanted the Greenies, broccoli snorters and planet huggers to all gather in one spot every year so they could take them out with hydrogen bombs. Its obvious. There is no possible doubt.

Where did clean your clock come from? Eli suspects from the same place that clocking someone came from, the latter being a metaphor for punching someone out, perhaps via punching the clock. thus clean your clock, e.g. emptying someones head by force.

Another idiom uses 'clocking' in the sense 'to take notice of', i.e. 'did you clock that girl in the red dress?'. Thus 'clean their clocks' interprets as refreshing someone's ability to take notice of something. Possibly by 'clocking' (striklng) them, as used to be done unjudgementally to all hysterics in movies of a certain age.

I would like to defend Hoffman! He is not saying that the sceptic was correct. He was saying that from the sceptics POV he was as sure that he was correct as Hoffman was of his position. There was no point in Hoffman trying to correct him because it is impossible, just as it would be impossible to persuade Hoffman that scepticism is correct.

It's about the difference between objective and subjective truth. We all believe our subjective truth is objective.

Another way of putting it is that AGW is a paradigm, and climate scepticism is anther paradigm. The question is how to you get the climate sceptics to make that paradigm shift. Well, first you have to recognise, as Hoffman did, that the sceptics have got their own paradigm!

While nothing is going to change the "potential donors" POV (Eli agrees with Alastair) doing anything but telling him that he should be taken seriously is the affirmation he needs.

A good example is the recent series of "unskewed" polling experts in the US. Everyone in the media including Fox knew they were smoking stuff that was going to be made legal in a few days, but the affirmation they got in the he said she said media, let alone the red sheets, was not a cool thing.

Well Kai, here we simply point out that the bunnies have no interest in talking to you or giving the appearance that we think anything you say or write has worth. In other words, what being told such a load of crap from a bullshit shill like you is not our idea of time profitably spent.

Alastair, we get that the donor thinks he is right. We simply know he is not. What is more, since his opinion is based entirely on ideology, lacking even a decent figleaf of evidence, his opinion is not even worthy of respect. It deserves ridicule. Period. And there is no point in trying to be "nice". The kind thing is to correct and educate the poor dumb SOB.

You wrote "Alastair, we get that the donor thinks he is right. We simply know he is not."

The donor does not think he is right. He knows he is right. Like you, he wanted to educate that "poor damn SOB" Hoffman by sending him to the Heartland Institute.

The bottom line is that you are not going to convince the sceptics by educating them or treating them as SOBs. They believe in what they are saying just as much as you do.

The Climate War is not going to be won by educational might. The next three thousand page report by the IPCC will have no effect. What we need to do is win over the hearts and minds of the general public. Now where did I hear that before?

The longer our society tolerates the idea that it is OK to simply believe whatever ignorant cockeyed ideas one has about scientific matters, the more difficult it will be to eventually dig ourselves out of the hole we have created by tolerating such BS for as long as we have.

"Coherent, consistent world views" that completely ignore the real world (!!) are should be called what they are: crap.

They are certainly not worthy of "study" (especially not with NSF dollars!)

Part Two is ~100 pages that covers the history of the science around tobacco, i.e., when did the tobacco companies know the cancer problem was real and wasn't going away. Indeed, they hid a lot of real science, obfuscated more, and generated a lot of diversions.

Public health scientists kept doing research, which helped, because the lawyers needed that as part of their efforts.

The tobacco guys used every extra-science tactic, especially as even the slightest doubts of the epidemiology got vanquished.

2) Then, indeed, it was teams of public health folks and lawyers who finally start winning the legal fights.

Those include, for example, Stanton Glantz at UCSF, and some dedicated lawyers, such as Roberta Walburn (Minnesota) and Sharon Eubanks (D.C.).

p.72 offers interesting info:'Bush ArrivesGeorge W. Bush's reputation for coddling the tobacco industry when he was governor of Texas worried us all. ...We all knew that Bush's allies had close ties to Philip Morris. Karl Rove, long before he became known as "Bush's Brain," was on Philip Morris' payroll for five years as a political intelligence operative. Rove opposed the lawsuit that the Texas Attorney General filed against the industry. (Bush publicly backed it after it was settled, bringing $17 billion to the state's treasury.'

This interlocks with Fakery 2, p.40, where NCPA offers to help PM by "access to GW Bush."

Via this search, one may find 140 hits on "Karl Rove" in the tobacco archives. ~1991-1995, he was a $3K/month consultant for PM.

Put another way, the real scientific argument was long over, but the tobacco companies knew well how to fight via political capture of key politicians.

While there is always uncertainty, the health scientists had to do it with epidemiology, without having any strong physics theory to help them. Hence, in certain respects, the theory+evidence for AGW is even stronger than for smoking-disease. (For instance, more people actually die of other tobacco-related diseases other than lung cancer, but that was focused on because most lung cancer deaths are caused by cigarette smoke.

Sorry John, crisp is 140 letters or less. Eli was pretty crisp. FWIW the public health information was pretty damn good long before the lawyers got to it. The one thing that took some time was to establish an animal model because humans are about the only animal that addicts to nicotine. The others would rather not.

See Proctor p.529 on baboons. Reynolds was studying uses for its Premier device.

'Critics charged that the only reason it contained tobacco at all was to exempt it from regulation as a new kind of drug delivery device - to which Reynolds responded by launching a series of investigations forcing baboons to smoke crack cocaine.'

'Southwest Research by the mid-1970s already had thirty-five baboons hooked cigarettes: Walter Rogers had trained them to smoke by depriving them of water and then allowing them to drink only through a tube through which smoke was also introduced.'

Eli is not so sure about that and after furious googling the bunny found what he remembered, e.g. Hecht 2005

"Introduction

The first study to show a robust increase in lung cancer in an animal model of cigarette smoke inhalation appears in thisissue of Carcinogenesis (1), more than 50 years after the initial epidemiologic studies linking smoking and lung cancer in humans (2,3). Why has this been so difficult to achieve? One reason is that humans actively and religiously inhale cigarette smoke to satisfy their extraordinary craving for nicotine, while animals are affronted by this toxic mixture and will do what they can to avoid it. This commentary will attempt to put the results of the new study in perspective with other inhalation studies of cigarette smoke, discuss the rationale for animal models of cigarette smoke exposure, the strengths and limitations of currently available models, and the need for integration of carcinogen biomarker data in future studies."

Eli:'The one thing that took some time was to establish an animal model because humans are about the only animal that addicts to nicotine. The others would rather not.'

I didn't say the animals *wanted* to get addicted. Obviously if one can only addict baboons by requiring them to smoke to get water, Joe Camel ads are not enough to convince them. Apparently, there are no baboon marketeers whose skill matches the tobacco guys.

Ah, but... Hasn't the research largely been done... and largely been ignored?

The "cure" for lung cancer is relatively simple in most cases. Prevention! And prevention is always better than cure, isn't it?

The numbers have been available for a long time, in some cases on the order of 50 years. We know the causes of most lung cancers: inhalation of carcinogens (usually over prolonged periods). These inhaled carcinogens are, amongst other sources, largely to be found in tobacco smoke (and the smoke of it's wacky "herbal" alternatives), in high radon-source localities, most forms of respirable asbestos (and other respirable particulates), and vehicle fumes.

What's difficult about tackling most of those? Ah, that would be vested interests... and plain ol' human stoopidity.

Once those "confounding" factors are removed, then instead of about 140 million premature deaths from lung cancer per century** you'd be largely left with those with a genetic predisposition (which ain't very many in the scheme of things -- my guesstimate would be on the order of 0.1% of that figure, maybe 1% tops).

Then it would be easier, perhaps, to find the "real cure" for those who, genetically speaking, have no choice in the matter of whether they are likely to get lung cancer or not (as opposed to those who have no choice in the matter but to put up with carcinogens in their local environment, that is).

The worst scenario I can imagine is finding a surefire way of curing lung cancer so that I might have to take medication I ordinarily wouldn't need to protect me from others' stoopidness and filthy habit. Hmmm. But I suppose that might be more preferable than to have to undergo chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and/or surgery because of someone else's kindly meant second-hand smoke donation to my possible future unwellbeing.

**OK, that's a very large number that some might consider fanciful, so we can use the WHO figure instead, which is just shy of 1.4 million per year :-J

Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide and accounted for 7.6 million deaths (around 13% of all deaths) in 2008. The main types of cancer are:

lung (1.37 million deaths)

I didn't search any deeper, as it was meant to be order of magnitude correct only and it tied in nicely (given the percentage usually ascribed to tobacco) with an estimate which I just happened to read about a couple of days earlier in a BBC article about Jordan Goodman's Tobacco in History that touches on James Duke's part in all this (yes, he of Duke University philanthropy) and James Bonsack's equipment design for mechanisation of rolling the evil weed into little white cancer sticks.

> One thing is clear (from > Proctor): the tobacco guys > sponsored a *lot* of research > that never got published, > except via the tobacco > archives.

As a little kid with big ears ("faculty brat") often wandering around the Duke Biology Dep't in the 1950s, I recall hearing from the relatively impoverished faculty we knew that there was another group -- tenured older professors -- whose well supported and longstanding research programs never published in the journals, because their work was all done for the tobacco companies and that's where their grad students found employment.

I recall someone at RC pointing out years ago that the energy companies have long done climate modeling -- paleoclimate modeling -- to figure out where basins formed that would have accumulated sediment that became petrochemicals (and where continental drift would have moved them). Also not published.

I think this little lot is also why there should be more framing of the climate debate within the context of whether you're pro-Holocene or anti-Holocene, i.e. whether you're pro-agriculture or anti-agriculture.

because I think someone was confused by the terminology, because this doesn't make sense.

1) Cigarette companies, faced with strong scientific evidence of cigarette/disease links, did a lot of internal research either to disprove that, or else somehow find that disease was caused by things they could change without affecting nicotine addiction, such as paper or additives. No credible research ever gave them the results they wanted, so it never got published.

2) People run existing climate models versus paleoclimate date typically for last 1,000-2,000 years, and maybe use data from the Holocene, and the last few million years, when the CO2 levels reached the knife-edge range that allows Milankovitch to drive glacial cycles.

3) Oil folks spend many compute cycles on seismic analysis and reservoir modeling. Anything they do with modeling of reservoir formation would have been for geological-timescale processes hundreds of millions of years ago.

Rabett Run

Subscribe Rabett Run

The Bunny Trail By Email

Contributors

Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional. His colleagues are smart, but they have a curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they occasionally heed his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.